The other female ghost is an older woman they call Nellie, who has, according to Niki, been with the building for as long as anyone could remember. One of the cooks claimed to have seen Nellie walk across the kitchen and out the back door—literally going through the door.
“We have a ghost cat, too, named Pickles,” said Nikki. “It was … 2009, I think. We’d just opened up, and I had a customer ask me why we allowed animals in the dining room. I told him that we didn’t. He swore he saw a white cat walking along the back wall. Other customers have seen him over the years too.”
Niki told me that they’ve had things like that happening from the very beginning. “One of the first things I personally witnessed was this big vase of flowers sliding right across one of the tables out on the sun porch. I was sitting right over there with three other people.” She pointed to a table by the window. “The vase went from the middle of the table right over the edge and broke.”
I had to admit, that seemed a little unusual.
“There was another time,” Niki went on, “when a lady came out of the restroom really shaken up. I asked her what happened. She told me she’d been standing in front of the mirror—there’s a wreath behind the mirrors. One of the glass globes on it just exploded. I made that wreath,” she added. “I know how well the ornaments are glued in place. There’s no reason for it to have just shattered like that. It didn’t fall, it just … exploded.”
That wasn’t the only ghostly encounter someone had had in the ladies’ restroom. Another time, Niki told me, one of the waitresses was in there by herself. “She told me that she dropped her cigarette lighter,” said Nikki. The lighter must have slid across the floor, because Niki said the waitress told her that as she was bending over to pick it up, it slid back to her, “like somebody had kicked it over to her.”
I supposed incidents like that were why Niki categorized the restaurant’s spirits as “friendly”—just a little mischievous from time to time. “Sometimes doors open and shut upstairs, or lights flicker. The old owners told me that sometimes the lights would sway back and forth in the bar for seemingly no reason at all,” she added.
Then Niki told me that after they bought the place, she asked the former owner if she had ever had any unusual experiences in the restaurant. “She lived in the apartment upstairs,” Niki explained. “She said that one morning she came down to get the paper from the front porch. She didn’t realize it was raining until she got downstairs, so she went back up to get her slippers. When she came back down, she found the wet newspaper sitting on the inside of the locked front door.”
Niki was also told that numerous people have seen “someone” cleaning the front upstairs windows—after the former owners moved out, but before Niki and her husband bought the place and moved into the upstairs apartment with their teenage daughter, Franchesca.
Antique humidor at Bone Head’s BBQ.
“What’s it like living in a haunted building?” I asked.
“At first my daughter was a little nervous—and sometimes it’s a little freaky when doors open up upstairs all by themselves. But the first thing I did when we moved in was ask God to watch over us and drive out anything bad. I figured the good spirits could stay, since they were here first. We haven’t had any problems; they’re just mischievous.”
Niki pointed out the clock on the wall and said that it had come with the restaurant, but it had never worked. The previous owners weren’t even sure it had “guts” or if it was just decorative.
“Then one night, at exactly eleven-thirty, it started bonging and the minute hand started to move. We were closed up for the night, all the lights were off, and there were just four of us in here. I’d just pulled the cash drawer and was taking it upstairs,” she said. “I turned around because I couldn’t figure out what the sound was at first. Then I realized it was the clock, and I called to the bartender and my brother-in-law, who were sitting in the bar area talking. I wanted them to see it. My brother-in-law got a chair and took the clock off the wall—all this time it had been bonging,” she added. “But as soon as he touched it, it stopped, and suddenly the time read five o’clock. It hasn’t made a sound or moved since then.
“And just recently,” she went on, “It was about seven-thirty in the morning, and I’d gone out for a run. When I got back, Jim told me that he could have sworn he heard me come in, walk up the stairs, go into the office, and open up the liquor cabinet. The cabinet door squeaks,” she explained. “It’s a pretty distinctive sound. He wondered what I was doing, so he went into the office—only I wasn’t back from my run yet. No one was in the office. The dog heard it too,” she added. “Jim told me the dog started barking when he heard the footsteps on the stairs.”
Niki said that they’d had a number of paranormal teams come out to investigate the place since they moved in. There have been a lot of orb photos taken as well as EVP (electronic voice phenomena) evidence and video clips, all of which can be accessed from Bone Head’s website.
Just about then Patrice, Niki’s office manager, came in. Niki called her over and explained what we were talking about, adding that Patrice had accompanied a couple of the paranormal teams when they were at the restaurant doing their investigations.
“Did you tell her about Bob?” Patrice asked.
“No, I almost forgot,” said Niki. “Bob used to live in the attic, right at the top of the stairs—it’s not much more than a crawl space, but I guess it used to be a bedroom. When the last team was out here they were communicating with him, weren’t they?”
Patrice nodded. “I think I remember them saying Bob told them he used to work on the property as some kind of caretaker or maintenance man.”
I wondered if maybe that was the apparition my friend’s son had seen.
“Have you had any experiences?” Niki asked Patrice.
“Not really … well, there was that one time I was sitting here with a friend of mine. She’s really sensitive to stuff like this,” explained Patrice. “She said she saw a little girl tugging on the apron sting of one of the waitresses.”
Later on, when Patrice asked that particular waitress if she’d felt anything unusual that night, the gal told her she’d felt a tugging on her apron string, but had just blown it off as “nothing.” Everyone agreed that was a little freaky. I thought so too.
Spotlight On: The Motor City Ghost Hunters
Last September I visited the Whitefish Point Lighthouse and Shipwreck Museum. Just as I was pulling in, the Motor City Ghost Hunters were pulling out. But before they could hit the road for the long trek back home, Beth, the housekeeper for the Crew Quarters at Whitefish Point, introduced us. I couldn’t have met with a nicer or more knowledgeable group of people.
As I was wrapping up the last details of this book, I got back in touch with John, who is both the team’s leader and founder, to thank him again for taking the time to talk with me that day back in September and to ask permission to use some of the information from their website to put together a “Team Profile” for my book. He graciously gave me the go-ahead and filled me in on some of the things they’ve been up to since the last time we spoke.
Probably the most exciting news is that when the Ghost Hunters were going over their footage from Whitefish Point, they
